


Guiding Light

by foundCarcosa



Category: Fable (Video Game)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-08
Updated: 2012-07-08
Packaged: 2017-11-09 10:54:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 963
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/454663
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/foundCarcosa/pseuds/foundCarcosa
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Albion is reclaimed from the Darkness, with the unexpected help of a Hero that once was.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Guiding Light

Bowerstone was burning.

Nuala, mad-eyed and screaming, sliced through the Children with unnatural speed, the enchanted blade gleaming fiercely — light to cut through darkness. The ground quaked beneath them as Sabine’s explosives added fuel to a raging fire. But Logan couldn’t see Page and her ragtag revolutionaries, or that pea-brained deserter Finn, or… anyone, aside from the flashes of gunfire and windows exploding from the force of belching flames.

He was fading, and if Bowerstone burned, it’d have to take him with it.

It was not a bullet that had felled him, not a blast of Will, not a gout of fire. None of his limbs were dangling by a mere few tendons, and as far as he knew, he’d fallen without breaking anything.  
No, no. He was simply tired.

The smoke was choking him, blinding him, grinding soot into his flesh and the back of his throat. His hands shook whenever they tried to hold the sword, and the rest of him was always quick to follow. The darkness had done its work — weakened him body and spirit, stealing his waking hours and sleeping hours, slipping tendrils of madness into his mind and slivers of atrophy into his muscles and cracks of infirmity into his bones and flecks of grey ash into his very flesh.

Nuala knew the darkness well, but she was a Hero.  
Mother, and daughter — Heroes both. To become king seemed a mockery in comparison.

“So,” he whispers harshly as one of the Children creep towards him, sensing the last flicker of defiant light in his eyes. “We meet again.”

The Child was there, a pair of void eyes in a city being voided peering into a soon-to-be-voided body — and then the Child wasn’t.

Something tugged at Logan, first at the core of him, then at his limbs and neck. With it came a rush of sweetness, something so rich and overwhelming that he thought he’d choke on it. His eyes watered as he stumbled to his feet, responding to its pull, opening his mouth as if to gulp in the energy itself.

Inexplicably, he began weeping.

The energy left him, but only long enough to take on a mercurial semblance of form. In flashes, he saw thick, curling hair, a curve of hip, a glint of teeth in a warm smile.  
The eyes held form the longest, and when he looked into them, he couldn’t feel the darkness anymore.

_Follow me._

Logan fumbled for the sword as he obliged, strength creeping into his limbs and keeping him from faltering, his eyes firmly fixed on the shimmering figure racing ahead of him. Children squealed and disintegrated in the spirit’s wake, unable to sully, unable to devour, unable to be.  
The spirit passed Nuala, and the queen paused with a sharp intake of breath, sword held high and trembling like a struck tuning fork — and then the moment passed, and with a banshee’s anguished scream she plowed through a creeping band of Children and darted towards where a team of guards was calling.

Logan staggered into the town square, and it was there he saw Walter come face to face with Darkness, for the last time.  
Nuala’s banshee scream began the battle — the scream of the already-mourning, of anguish beyond ken, of the mindless fury that can only follow great loss. Her blade flashed against Walter’s, the old man filled with a frenetic vitality that wasn’t his, and whenever he blurred and the Darkness’ form showed through, Logan’s head throbbed and bile rose in his throat in a hot rush.

But he could do nothing. The warmth, the spirit, kept him away. He would dart forward, and feel himself gently pushed back.  
And then the warmth dimmed, and cold fear clenched around Logan’s heart.

Nuala had been pushed to her knees, fiery hair escaping its braid, teeth gritted and lips peeled back as she struggled to keep her blade against the possessed man’s. He blurred, and the Darkness’ voice spoke sweetly, dimming her, blunting her fury, devouring her will.  
Just as her eyes dulled and her chin trembled, a shimmering light passed before her eyes, and she collapsed as Walter’s weight was pushed away, and when she looked up again, the light was hovering over Walter’s fallen form.  
But the Darkness was there, too, and when they met, no one could look. Bowerstone shuddered, a concussive blast stemming outward, and when the surviving vestiges of the army opened their eyes again, the light was still there, but Darkness was not.

Nuala began to sob.  
The light dimmed, taking on its shimmering, mercurial form again, and touched her — brushing hair away from forehead, caressing a dirt-covered cheek. The word Nuala spoke, the word of identification, the word that is synonymous with 'god' on the lips of all babes, was lost in her wretched crying.

The spirit wafted towards Walter’s prone form, and after lingering for a moment — a flash of a bowed head, a hand on invisible heart — it once again returned to Logan. Shivering, sick Logan, who fought to keep from vomiting and held his aching head in his hands as if it would explode if he let go.

Sadness washed over him in a chilly wave, but was immediately followed by that soothing warmth again. The pain and nausea abated enough for him to look up, up into those almost-solid eyes one more time.

“Thank you,” he croaked, and something like gentle fingers touched his lips, then his forehead, the sensation changing to something like a kiss.

_I’ll wait for you, my child. At the clearing. I’ll wait._

And then Bowerstone was burning again, and the remaining Albans were staggering into the square, and they gathered around Sparrow’s children as the last of the Darkness fled in her wake.


End file.
